


Loathing

by PleasantlyWeird



Series: Tommy and Heather [1]
Category: Warrior (2011)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-22
Updated: 2014-01-22
Packaged: 2018-01-09 16:17:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1148077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PleasantlyWeird/pseuds/PleasantlyWeird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Heather lets Tommy in on something from her past</p>
            </blockquote>





	Loathing

**Author's Note:**

> So in the beginning this was posted as an original work. I wasn't aware that sort of thing wasn't allowed here but apparently SOMEONE reported it and I was asked to take it down by AO3. (and thanks, btw, for all your HARD work trying to get to me, you know who you are) So I thought, you know, I could let this disappear, let the wretched little troll get to me; but then I thought, NO. This should be read and wouldn't it be exactly the sort of thing my heroine from Every Purpose Under Heaven would've written? So there you have it. Foiled again, little girl. Now run along...

 “Tommy, did I ever let you read this?” Heather asks as waves a tattered piece of paper she’d pulled from an old shoe box.

“Nah baby, whassit about?” He asks, sliding on his belly to the edge of the bed nearest where his girl sat in the floor.

Grasping the paper to her chest she looks at him, an emotion he can’t place written in her expression. “Listen, this is very personal and raw. I don’t want to say anymore, I just want you to read it.”

Taking the paper from her shaking hand he rolls onto his back after smiling at her. Looking down at the now familiar scrawl of her handwriting, he begins to read.

**Loathing**

Look at her. She’s disgusting. I can’t stand her hair; and I absolutely I hate the way she does her makeup. Look at the way she dresses, I bet everyone laughs behind her back when she walks into the room. She tries to make herself believe that those chuckles sneaking through hiding hands aren’t about her but you can believe that they really are. She looks at her feet when she walks, always afraid to make eye contact because she doesn’t want to see the ridicule in people’s faces. Sometimes there’s pity in those faces and somehow it’s a lot worse. How pathetic is it to be pitied? Her mousiness and meekness are nauseating.

She’s always trying too hard or not trying hard enough, telling herself one day that it doesn’t matter what people think about her and deciding the next day that it does. She’s been a knock-around person since she was a little girl; treated more like inconvenient luggage than a human being. Parents, school mates, siblings, none of them ever hesitated to tell her how stupid, ugly and worthless she was. She never thought to question if what they said to her was true. She just accepted their views and took them as truth. She still believes what people say and think about her.

“ _Sit down, shut up! Be seen and not heard, ah to hell with that, I don’t wanna see you either!”_ That was the refrain of the soundtrack to her childhood. It doesn’t take long to browbeat all the vigor and confidence out of a girl, to reduce her to a shell of a person and it shows on this one’s face. Every line is a testament to hardship, if you care to know her story. It’s only amazing that tears haven’t worn a well-travelled path down her face like the constant downturn of a frown has left gullies on each side of her mouth.

Her tale is perfectly cliché, a story told a thousand times by a thousand women and it’s written in the way she moves; it sings loud in her hesitancy and is painted in the canvas of her cowardice. It would absolutely break my heart if I didn’t hate her so much. She’s like a dog that’s been kicked a lot, looking for the next blow to come out of nowhere and bring pain; she lives in a constant cower.  She doesn’t like to let anyone inside the massive walls she’s built around her soul; it’s her lonely, isolated fortress. It’s been a long time since anything got close to her heart, so long that sometimes she wonders if it her heart even beats anymore. It seems more like a dead lump inside of her chest that no longer has any sort of purpose, or that’s what she tells herself anyway. It’s safer to pretend to be dead inside. You can’t hurt a dead thing.

She wanders through everyday life as something akin to a zombie. Unfeeling, uncaring, (she tries to convince herself) and doing only the minimum to get by and appear human. She goes through the motions to avoid drawing attention to herself because attention is a bad thing. Better to be a shadow in the corner, fleeting through the periphery of everyone’s sight. It’s safer that way; shadows don’t get put down and ridiculed.

 Doormat is a word that comes to mind when you look at her and she knows that she has no one to blame but herself. People can only do to you what you allow them to do. She must secretly like the abuse and just can’t bring herself to admit it. So she doesn’t complain when people take advantage of her, she merely expects it. She quietly thinks that it might win her favor but it only sets her up to be used time and time again. She’s a pathetic people pleaser who scurries like a mouse around and under the stomping feet of the world. It’s one of the reasons she’s so despicable to me; it’s why I feel a surge of anger every time she’s in my sight. It’s a bloodthirsty reaction that makes me want to attack her, scream at her, tell her what a useless waste of space she is.

The worst is when she gets that hopeful smile on her doughy, bloated face; the one that tells you that she’s trying to make the best of a bad situation. She puts on a front, lying to herself and the rest of the world. It’s wretched to see because deep down inside she knows it’s pointless. The smile doesn’t cover up her hopelessness any more than the makeup covers her wrinkles and worry lines. That pointless, pitiful smile doesn’t last long because it doesn’t take long for the world to start wearing her down again.

Her youth is ghosting away day by day. She’s not a has-been, she’s a never was. She never did a damn thing to better someone’s life, never invented anything, and never did anything for herself that was worthwhile. Now she looks back on her existence and she wonders if this is an unforgivable sin. Can she be forgiven for having squandered a life so desolately? It’s too late to become, to emerge as a butterfly after a lifetime in a cocoon of loathing and self-hatred. She’s a worm-girl who’s bound forever to crawl in the dirt while the butterfly-chicks flit overhead, laughing at her predicament and thanking the gods that be that they aren’t a damn thing like her.

Her body is a mess; it seems like she gave up on that project a long time ago. She hides her “dis-figure” under layers of unflattering clothes so she can become invisible to the universe. No one hates the way she looks more than she does; at least that’s what she tells herself. Stress makes her hair fall out in clumps so she hides under hats a lot. Some days she tries to disguise her face with makeup but it makes her look garish; it only serves to point out every flaw on her visage. She surely reminds people of an old drunk bag lady trying desperately to hold on to a younger day that’s slipped through her fingers like sand.

Looking at her is like looking at the most pitiable, useless thing in the universe. It’s like a human ten-car pileup. You know you should turn your head and avoid staring at the carnage but you can’t look away. The overall effect for most people is a grade A example of how they don’t want to turn out. She’s a cautionary tale for the rest of the human race; a walking study in wretched-ology, a worst freaking case scenario wrought from tragedy and regret.  Some people probably pity her, but not me. Mine is a deep seated anger that makes me want to claw her eyes out, makes me want to hurt her for being the way that she is. I want to shake her for being so utterly dumb and horrid. I want to run her out of the village with pitchforks and torches because she offends my eyes. She’s an emotional Frankenstein, a patchwork of scars holding together something that can’t be quantified as truly alive. She doesn’t really exist, she lingers.

She often wonders who the joke is really on. Are the Powers That Be having a huge laugh at her daily struggle to feel like part of the human race? Or is the joke being played on those who have to look at the hot mess that she is? Did she ever have a chance to be a butterfly or was the deck stacked against her before sperm met egg and she began? Was it written in the stars that she was doomed to fail at everything and so her fate was set or did she just not try hard enough to shine? I wonder all of these things as I look at her and she stares, unblinkingly, back at me from the mirror.

By Heather Hunter

 

Tommy’s hands shake and he swallows a lump in his throat before he looks at the woman he loves again. She’s staring back at him, wide-eyed and he knows that she’s running a million scenarios through her head about what he’s thinking. He ends her anguish with one sentence.

“Baby, come here and let me prove to you that none of that is true.”

 

 


End file.
